[ninth_ant]

From the perspective of “is this anti-competitive and hurting consumers” it’s irrelevant if Ticketmaster is the Big Bad End Guy or just a stooge.

The important part is, anti-competitive behaviour leads to higher prices and lower levels of innovation.

[dmix]

A small subset of the B2B-level customers always benefits from monopolies. But this only reduces competition in their own markets... in this case the limited set of musicians and record labels who succeed via special treatment by Ticketmaster's monopoly.

Ultimately it harms more musicians/labels than it benefits. Especially in the long run.

This shows that monopolies not only harm their own markets but plenty of sub-markets as well.

The influence successful companies have on gov policy-making is one of the best arguments against ever more specialized gov intervention in markets. The best solution is gov policy that shuts down anti-competitive behaviour full-stop.

Not creating specialized 200+ page bills that can be exploited by the big players (see how Dodd-Frank resulted in only 5 mega-banks controlling a market while tons of small/medium banks shut down due to their unrealistic requirements) - which is often what's pushed both by politicians and inadvertently by the public who buy into false narratives about punishing corporate greed.